Every month we’re searching through 100’s of scientific articles, so you don’t have to.

What is your association with thinness? Discipline? Beauty? Health? That doesn’t come as a surprise. Advertisers, the movie industry and social media are reinforcing these associations every day, making us believe that being thin is hard work and that everyone can be thin, provided that they have sufficient self-discipline. In Western societies we even see a stereotypical connection between a person’s weight and their economic value, such as success and financial achievement. On the contrary people with a high Body Mass Index (BMI) tend to hold a negative body image about themselves and are more likely to be affected by those idealized standards.

Even Eminem benefits from neuromarketing

Remember Eminem? He was gone quiet for almost four years. Lately, Post Malone, Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been topping the Global Charts.

Every year in November, MTV Europe Music Awards (EMA) review the year and award the best songs. This year, to everyone’s surprise and confusion, Eminem won the Best Hip Hop song with his most recent creation “Walk on Water”. The song was released days before the EMAs. Even Eminem himself was confused with his award as he hasn’t done anything in years. Was the song so great that everyone instantaneously fell in love with it?

Consider the following scenario. You are walking through your city on a Saturday afternoon, looking to buy a new shirt. All of a sudden, a retail store of an expensive high-end brand catches your eye, with several beautiful high-class shirts in the storefront. You’ve never bought anything from this brand, but you really like it’s style and designs.

Enthusiastically you check how much one shirt costs and are shocked to find that the price tag of one of these shirts almost equals your entire weekly paycheck. Would you be ready to pay this enormous amount of money for a shirt from a brand you’ve never owned anything from?

Influencing behavior through advertisements, both consciously and unconsciously, but especially the latter, has given neuromarketing a bad reputation. Take James Vicary’s famous subliminal messaging experiment from the 1950s as an example. Vicary claimed that subliminal projections telling ten thousands of people to Drink Coca-Cola and to Eat Popcorn during a movie caused a 18 % sales increase for Coca Cola and 58 % sales increase for popcorn.